----- Original Message ----- From: "David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> To: "Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com> Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2005 12:36 PM Subject: Re: extinction paper
Though I didn't care enough to really think about it, at first glance it seems terrible.
It is terrible. Reptilia (why in italics? PhyloCode -- and then classes -- and then several "phyla" as well as Actinopterygii as classes???) as the sistergroup of "dinosaur", dinosaur extinction as any challenge at all to evolutionary biology (as opposed to physics), reptiles as unique among all animals in being poikilothermic... and the proposed reason for dinosaur extinction
Cold weather, basically!
would have killed off everything except "Reptilia" and _perhaps_
the viviparous animals. Oopsie, and those that brood their eggs -- it
literally goes without saying that no dinosaur ever brooded. Oh, everything
in the water survives! The authors should let a mosasaur bite them.
Plus the general confusion over singular/plural and articles (all of which
are missing in Chinese). I want the heads of the peer-reviewers -- assuming
any exist, but Elsevier should have peer-review -- on a silver plate
[... or platter, right?].
Fig. 1 is interesting, however. Someone should find out what it says.